for-now: 2008

When I was little I used to play with my friend every day. We would swim in circles in her above ground pool making whirl pools that would collect all the bugs and dead leaves in the center, then we would scoop them out. Big green beetles would crawl around on the ground next to the pool and bats would fly in our hair at night. We would eat sheppard's pie and watch wheel of fortune on tv. At her house there was coca cola in the fridge and when we drove in the van we didn't have to wear seatbelts. Her mom shopped at the bigger, more expensive grocery store, where you could get cups of hot chocolate or apple cider from a machine in one of the aisles. The best part was watching the machine dispense the cup and then magically fill it with hot liquid--it seemed so precarious, so lucky that it didn't miss. Her mom used to make tapes of saturday morning cartoons that we would watch on sleepovers, from a bed made of two couches pushed together like a crib, while eating bags of microwave popcorn. We used to form clubs all the time--we were ambitious. We started a band but never got further than making t-shirts. We started a troll doll club and made up a theme song for it. We would have meetings in a little crawlspace in my house, whose walls were covered with the names of boys we liked. We would stay up late at sleepovers playing super mario brothers and having seances and playing oujji board. We would take baths together with our barbie dolls. Her extended family used to come over a lot and I called her grandma "Grandma" which my friend didn't like. We called each others' parents by their first names. Sometimes I would hit her--I went through a slapping on the face phase--and get sent home. No hitting was allowed in her house, which was strange and kind of relieving. One time at my house my dad slapped her and we marched around talking about calling child protective services. Another time, when she was taking a while putting on her shoes, he threatened to drag her home by her hair, and she was afraid of him for years. We used to hang out in her room listening to this promotional 45" from McDonald's. It was some kids singing the names of all the things you could get at McDonald's really fast and if some certain thing happened at the end it meant you won a prize. Her record wasn't prize winning but we liked the song so we would listen to it all the time and try to memorize it. We played melodramatic games with our dolls on her bed. I remember one time she got in trouble for falling asleep with gum in her mouth.

Both of our houses are fancier now--cleaner, finished, with additions. But her family doesn't live in that house anymore because when we were in high school her parents split up. Her mom moved to a condo and her dad moved to pennsylvania to live with a vietnamese woman he had met during the war and been secretly continuing a relationship with ever since. My friend's mom found out because the woman wrote a book about it and someone she ran into at the grocery store had read it and thought she should know. And I found out about it from my mom, because by then me and my friend weren't friends anymore.

My friend was never the kind of person who was popular in school--she didn't have an aloof bone in her body--but she was incredibly magnetic and when you were with her she seemed like the most profoundly correct person--her statements were all so final and decisive. Though I was bossy then too and we fought often. She wanted to be an actress and a singer, I wanted to be an artist and a writer. She lives in new york now in an apartment she can't afford, cooking in restaurants and doing one-woman reviews where she sings beautifully about food and love. I live cheap in california, teaching esl and trying to make art. I went to one of her shows last spring. Her mom was there; she told us we both looked old.